Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Ok so don't get too excited just yet.. Mental Ray will be free for single, in Maya rendering, similar to Arnold, but you will have to still pay for a "production render license" to batch. However,, that license cost $65/machine/year. So not too shabby. Floating licenses are $295 or $995 for a 5-pack, while systems containing a professional NVIDIA GPU qualify for special pricing of $95 or $325 for a 5-pack. Customers who purchased mental ray standalone from Autodesk will have their subscriptions matched with NVIDIA licenses at no cost. Also, the mental ray production render will be free for colleges and universities. According to the blog, this will all go into affect November 30th MRBLOG about Free MR

Friday, November 11, 2016

Steven Roselle releases a nice overview of all the bonus tool additions and updates for 2017 For those you unfamiliar with Bonus tools, they are a lot of small production tools packaged up to a menu set for Maya. Sometimes these tools will find there way into the next version , but more often than not I treat them as "possibilities" and jumping off points for scripts that you could update and add yourself. But they do include a lot of tools that make your life easier. Bonus tools does have in installer so it will hijack some of your personal setup, like hotkeys and some menus. So be sure to save a copy of your prefs before installing , just to make sure you don't over write some of your own custom setups. For me, I generally install bonus tools to a fresh preferences, and then pick out the tools I want and copy them over to my Maya preferences. ( case in point there are several hotkeys like ctrl + 2 that will activate the HUD for bonus tools Display ,, I've already got that mapped, and would like to keep my own settings) blog: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/author/my-oh-mayabonus tools available here: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-maya-blog/bonustoolsof note: